With the release of Ubuntu 8.10 only a few days away, Phoronix decided to take a look at the performance figures over the past releases - from Ubuntu 7.04 to Ubuntu 8.10. Phoronix used its own extensive test suite on fresh installations, with the same parameters, on the identical hardware. The results are rather surprising. Update: I've added some more information about this, gathered from the Ubuntu mailing list. You can find it in the 'read more'.

the lack of OpenOffice.org 3.0 in Ubuntu which outweighs *any* performance regression its really stupid, and having it in backports is simply not good enough.

OpenOffice.org 3.0 is still very new. You have to realize that Ubuntu supports huge amount of languages officially. People would expect that they get a fully working office package with well-working spell-checking and hyphenation for the languages they write in (if those languages are not very small only). For example, OpenOffice.org 3 still doesn't have those things in my mother tongue, thus I rather use Ooo 2 still - although I could get Ooo 3 for Ubuntu 8.10 quite easily from the PPA repositories too (and I'm too busy to compile and test some alpha or beta versions of hyphenation & spell-checking just now).